On this day in 1897, the British government agreed that the United States should arbitrate a long-simmering border dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana, then a British colony on the north coast of South America, thereby defusing an escalating diplomatic crisis between London and Washington.

The competing territorial claims originated with the Spanish and the Dutch empires and were inherited by Venezuela and Great Britain, respectively, in the early 19th century.

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In 1895, Richard Olney, the U.S. secretary of state, invoking a broader interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, declared that the U.S. had a right to intercede in the Western Hemisphere in any dispute that directly affected American interests.

Britain, however, refused to submit the quarrel to U.S. arbitration. That provoked a sharp reaction from President Grover Cleveland and Congress, causing the crisis to intensify over the next two years.

Finally, the Marquess of Salisbury, the British prime minister, acknowledging that he had misjudged the depth of Cleveland’s anger, tacitly accepted the validity of the Monroe Doctrine in resolving the dispute. Robert Arthur Humphreys, a British historian, later called the crisis “one of the most momentous episodes in the history of Anglo-American relations in general and of Anglo-American rivalries in Latin America in particular.”

In 1899, a five-member commission comprising two members each from the U.S. and Britain and chaired by a Russian diplomat, met in Paris and awarded 94 percent of the disputed territory to Britain. There the matter rested for half a century until the posthumous publication of an allegation by Severo Mallet-Prevost, a legal counsel for Venezuela and a partner in the New York law firm Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle, that the tribunal had acted improperly and acquiesced to a back-room deal between Russia and Great Britain.

That charge prompted Venezuela in 1962 to revive its claims. Guyana became an independent nation in 1966. The dispute remains unresolved.